drthunder

The US has enough money for both universal healthcare and our obscene military budget, we just choose to only have one.

More than that, the numbers I keep seeing thrown around are that Harris got 75m votes, Trump got 77m, and 90m didn’t bother voting.

Exactly. Voting has never been enough, but it’s also the absolute bare minimum. How am I supposed to trust people to have my back who couldn’t take an hour out of their day to check some boxes?

Harm reduction would have saved trans people like me from being erased by the government.

You don’t think the peaceful protests were backed by the threat of union violence that had been regular up until the New Deal?

The media tried so hard to make people hate Luigi in December and it didn’t work because everyone knows insurance companies murder for profit. Voting hasn’t helped, the media is owned by oligarchs, most social media is too, and if you protest you either get ignored or beaten up by the cops.

It’s not my first choice of action even now, but probably-Luigi killed a guy who was otherwise untouchable and the oligarchs flipped their shit. Abraham Lincoln’s death gimped Reconstruction, MLK’s death hurt the civil rights movement (and spurred nationwide riots causing passage of another civil rights act), Panthers leadership hurt their organization too.

We have a 40-hour work week because unions literally fought for it. I’d guess most people don’t want more violence but working through the system was pretty impossible even before fascists took complete control last month.

No, but pretty much everyone with a shred of power here is either fascist or too chickenshit to stand up to them.

Gil desperately trying to sell Colecos convinced me as a kid that they were bad computers, and the association hasn’t completely gone away.

Agreed on everything except your last sentence. I argued with people all of last year saying what you’re saying. There were pretty quickly protests and rallies, off the top of my head I remember going to rallies in November 2023, January 2024, and June 2024, and people are still talking about it. I went to an event last weekend too.

I do see idiots both in real life and online who are clearly more interested in fighting the Democrats than actually helping the cause though; right after the election I went to a rally at which someone said she’ll work with anyone who wants to fight the Democrats, no mention of the impending dictatorship, and got applause, and it really put me off of my local activist scene.

There are idiots in the Palestine movement who didn’t vote, but there are plenty of people who voted for Harris too, myself included. It doesn’t take a psyop to see that a genocide that’s being live streamed is a genocide.

ICE told the government two or three weeks ago that they’d need like $26 billion to enforce the Laken Riley act, I think.

And it’s one of the most useful government offices if you’re a billionaire who travels by plane everywhere. Plebs who have to drive everywhere are a lot less affected by overworked, overstressed, underpaid ATCs than guys like him.

I want to see some Nazis get hadoken’d

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Not having to tear things down would be great, but how do we do that at this point? The president is above the law, and has Congress, the courts, cops, a newly-freed legion of brownshirts, and an actual cult on his side. His party’s been getting away with ratfucking elections for at least 25 years.

I certainly think we can tear things down nonviolently, but we’re out of ways to do this politely. I don’t know how we get past the right-wing propaganda machine or government not being very democratic in the first place. We need to hugely expand the House, get rid of the Senate, and limit federal judge terms at the very least, and none of those are going to happen as long as the federal government is stacked in fascists’ favor. The last meaningful amendment was passed in 1971.

I wonder what the mildest thing a true AI could tell the oligarchs to do that would make them shut it down. Giving 10% of their wealth away and not in a tax dodge way? Stop funding fascists?

On top of what everyone else has said, I’m gonna be that person and bring up capitalism, which I’m defining as private ownership of business (as opposed to state ownership, or ownership by the workers, etc). Capitalism concentrates money, and by extension power, which is never good for people without it. I’ll admit I’m biased as a socialist, but at this point the biggest indictment of capitalism for me is that most of what we’re seeing these days isn’t new: rampant wealth inequality which leads to institutions decaying, followed by liberal and conservative elites being either unable or unwilling to fix problems that are plain for everyone to see, followed by people being radicalized.

The new thing is global warming, which can’t be attributed solely to capitalism but is being exacerbated by it. A handful of people who get their money and power from fossil fuels would rather burn the world to ashes than give up that money and power (yes, they’re probably investing in renewables, but if they treated global warming like the existential threat it is, they wouldn’t be bankrolling climate deniers.

(this should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the Soviet Union or the current Chinese government, they are/were both also results of capitalism failing but neither of those is relevant to democracy failing in the West™ also I’m not a tankie, authoritarianism of every stripe is bad)

I saw a take a few months ago that voting third party isn’t voting your conscience, voting your conscience is going against what you really want to do, to do what will actually result in the least harm happening. Our system of government is absolute trash but until it changes (and we should all be pushing for it to change) this is what we’ve got.

If you like the aggressive energy of that song, other ones like that are WWIII; Bullets, Bombs, and Bigotry; Paradise; and KMF. They have a shitload of music but that’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

Here are my thoughts:

• Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza since day 1, they just pick up the pace sometimes
• Every US president this century has enabled this
• Biden and Harris were all on board with the current round of fast genocide and they should be remembered for it
• Trump pretends to be anti-war but emboldened this shit by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 or 19
• Netanyahu wanted Trump to win, as evidenced by meeting him during the campaign last year
• Any ceasefire supposedly happening right now is entirely to give Trump good press. He’s going to give Israel even more support for their imperialist bullshit than Biden did and Harris would have
• Because Trump won, the federal government is going after immigrants, nonwhite people, LGBT people, etc, and is going to further tear the good parts of the government down

I’m pretty disillusioned with the Democrats between the imperialism and almost completely giving in to the fascist takeover, but I wouldn’t be looking to get out of the country if Harris had won, so thanks for that if you could have voted and didn’t.

edit: I voted Uncommitted in the primary, helped out at my local Gaza camp, and have gone to rallies and distributed books about Palestine, so I’m not just sitting here at my computer saying all this